My introduction to modern board gaming is thanks, in large part, to party games. My friends and I played Apples To Apples often in high school, and in college we played a fair share of Balderdash and Telestrations. When I first got back into board gaming many years later, one of my first purchases was Wavelength, which remains one of my favorite games. I decided to look into the highest rated party games on BoardGameGeek, and I was surprised that, by my definition, most of the games listed wouldn’t be party games. This led me to try to consider and codify what I think a party game really is: I believe that the most essential characteristic of a party game is the ability to have players come-and-go throughout the game - and here are some characteristics that help to enable this.
What makes a party game? #
One essential element of a party game is a flexible player count. This allows individual players to join or leave the game without disrupting the flow of the game for the other players. It also helps to avoid awkward cases where somebody needs to be “left out” in order to fulfill the needs of a game.
In a party atmosphere, most people prefer to jump right into the action rather than spend a lot of time reading through a rulebook. The game needs to be easy to understand - ideally, easy enough that you can grasp most of the rules by just watching a round or two. This means simple rules that can be explained in just a few minutes to make the game more accessible to everyone, regardless of their gaming experience.
The last characteristic to facilitate the coming-and-going of players is a larger emphasis on the “round” rather than the “game” - or, at least, a short game length. There are a few reasons that this is so important to party games. It expedites the learning process, making it easy for newcomers to “learn-as-you-play.” It also allows for flexibility of the session length. Players, either individually or as a group, can play as many or as few rounds as they’d like, tailoring the session’s length to the time available.
My framework might be a little more restrictive than other definitions of party games, but I think that it captures the types of games that you’d actually see played at parties. On my next post, I’ll use this framework to talk about the BoardGameGeek Top 10 Party Games and decide which I believe actually are “true” party games.
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